SGI invented OpenGL and offered it first on their IRIX platform. SGI's MIPSpro compiler has the "char" datatype as unsigned by default, so the compiler would likely complain if assigning a GLbyte pointer to an [unsigned] character pointer. Thus, to do something like
char* ext = glGetString(GL_VENDOR); doesn't require a cast on IRIX, while the same code would require a cast using other compilers due to the aforementioned problem. Patrick On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 1:44 PM, Allen Akin <a...@arden.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 12:20:54PM -0600, tom fogal wrote: > | glGetString and gluErrorString, plus maybe some other functions, return > | GLubyte pointers instead of simply character pointers... > | What's the rationale here? > > I agree, it's odd. I don't remember the rationale, but my best guess is > that it papered over some compatibility issue with another language > binding (probably Fortran). I suppose there's a very slight possibility > that it sprang from a compatibility issue with Cray. > > Allen > _______________________________________________ > mesa-dev mailing list > mesa-dev@lists.freedesktop.org > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev >
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